


A Beginner's Guide to Semiotics

by kethni



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: F/M, Season 2, request
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-05 11:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11576970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kethni/pseuds/kethni
Summary: “I love you” was a verbal gewgaw, as fragile and vulgar as a glass Christmas tree bauble.





	A Beginner's Guide to Semiotics

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Anonymous for the request

“I love you” was meaningless. People bandied it around as a kind of magic spell. As if it had some kind of deeper intrinsic meaning.

It wasn’t even a symbol, because a symbol knew that it pointed to something else, a signifier of some deeper truth. “I love you” was a verbal gewgaw, as fragile and vulgar as a glass Christmas tree bauble.

He had tried saying it. Not to her. Just… In the past. The words sounded faltering and false.

Language was intolerably imprecise. Kent spoke several, if you included ASL, and although he was fluent in all of them, none of them were satisfying. Words were slippery things, but worse than that they were weak. Mere pallid reflections of the concepts he was attempting to impart. Saying “I love you,” was as accurate a representation of the roiling, burning mass of confused and conflicting adoration, hunger, worship, and desire, as “it’s hot” was an accurate representation of the sun.

Words lied. Words said too much, or not enough.

Semiotics was one of Kent’s special interests. The study of signs and symbols. What it meant when _this_ appeared. What was signified by _that_.

What it meant when Sue looked after him in a thousand tiny ways.

What it signified when he cared for her in a thousand tiny ways.

The worst time Kent had at school wasn’t when Michael Berry punched him, or even when he got a ‘B’ on his calculus test, it was when they were studying poetry. Weeks and weeks of poring over haphazardly abbreviated words in forms that claim to have rules, only to flout them constantly, stresses he couldn’t hear, and metaphors he didn’t understand. It had been a long, torturous slog. He couldn’t see why it was important or what it could mean.

‘It’s romantic,’ his father told him. ‘It’ll help you with girls.’

‘It helps you see the beauty in the world and experience different ways of thinking,’ his mother said.

‘Fuck poetry, listen to this album. Don’t analyse it. Turn off your brain and let the music wash over you,’ his sister said.

Music had been the first step to semiotics. Music had rules. Kent couldn’t turn off his brain. As the music washed over him, he heard the bars and the beats and the precise interaction between them. He heard a guitar soar and a saxophone sobbing and knew that music was as superior to words as running was to crawling.

Music was rife with signs and symbols. Not in the way of ridiculous conspiracy theories. Kent had no time for people who believed that Paul McCartney was dead because of an album cover, or any other nonsense. No. Music took messy, inexplicable, uncomfortable emotions, and shaped them into something clean, and precise, and almost unbearably intense.

Music had led to movies, which were still cluttered with words, but which also had cinematography. Set design. Wardrobe. Visual signs and symbols working together with music to crystallise things he understood and couldn’t ever explain.

He seduced Sue with _The Fountain_.

It had been risky. It was, for him, a high intensity film. He knew that it wasn’t for everyone. He knew that if she didn’t understand it then she would never understand him.

At some point, she had taken hold of his hand. He had looked across at her and seen her staring unblinkingly at the television. At the end of the movie, she squeezed his hand so tightly that he had to look at her.

Her eyes were closed.

Her eyes were closed and his heart sank.

Her eyes were closed and a tear ran down her face.

She looked at him, as the credits rolled and music played. She looked at him, and they barely made it into the bedroom.

He traced words on her belly. Words he’d never say. She caught his hand and kissed his fingers, one at a time.

He didn’t say “I love you.” She didn’t ask him to call.

The following day he gave her a takeout coffee from her favourite coffee place. She straightened his tie, and told him to buy new shoes.

She took him to an art gallery. They drifted among Klimpts, shivered through the Gigers, and sat down among the Kahlos.

Kent took Sue’s hand. He admired its slenderness and the darkness of her skin. He admired all the ways she wasn’t him.

‘Do you appreciate art?’ Sue said.

‘This is the first time I’ve given it my full attention,’ he said.

‘Do you like it?’

‘I don’t know how I feel about it.’

It was an answer that never pleased. People expected him to be rational. Logical. That he might not be sure what he felt, that it might take him a few hours or days to sort through his emotions, seemed to challenge people. It wasn’t how people were supposed to act. They were supposed to easily define their feelings, to wrangle and control their emotions with their words; their slippery, insubstantial words.

Sue crossed her legs. ‘You need some time.’

‘I do.’

Sue nodded. ‘Understood.’

That was all. No further questions. No arguments.

‘You like art?’ Kent asked.

‘I appreciate it,’ Sue said. ‘Some of it I like a great deal. Some of it I despise. That is the function of art.’

Kent thought about it. ‘I’d like to see some more.’

‘Certainly.’

She courted him with Kandinsky and Rembrandt. He wooed her with White Noise and Pink Floyd.

She brought him a spicy duck salad for his lunch. Kent updated her computer programmes.

As he leaned over her to move her mouse, she turned her head. Their faces were centimetres apart.

‘What?’ Kent asked.

‘Nothing,’ Sue said, raising an eyebrow. ‘This is my desk. I can look in any direction that I choose.’

‘And this is the direction that you chose?’

‘It is.’

‘But you can’t see anything,’ Kent murmured.

‘I can see everything I wish to see,’ Sue said.

He took her a concert. She took him to a dance.

Neither of them were as smooth and well-coordinated as their fellows, but she was warm in his arms, and her spicy perfume tangoed along his spine.

They walked under the moonlit sky. Their fingers were entwined. Sue’s heels tapped along the paving.

Her heels were a symbol: of personal power, of femininity, of the particular strength that flaunts and fetishizes its own vulnerability.

His suit was a symbol: of masculinity, sure, but of respect much more than that. The respect for social convention. The respect for her strength by not flaunting his own.

Sue took Kent to bed to the swell and swoop of Tchaikovsky.

She didn’t say “I love you.” He didn’t ask her to call.

She left deep, tender bites on his chest and belly. Afterwards, he explored the edges of the bites with his fingertips. They stung at his touch, a delicate, subtle pain that skipped and pirouetted along his skin. It was oddly pleasing.

He called her Susan. A simple sign of his familiarity.

She told him when he was giving Too Much Information. A simple sign of her familiarity.

She overheard Roger Furlong sneering about Kent, and so locked him out of Selina’s schedule before contacting POTUS’s appointment secretary to do the same thing.

Kent heard Jonah’s rating the VP’s female staff, including Sue, and told the boy exactly what would happen if he failed to treat all female staff with respect and dignity.

‘He’s a robot,’ Selina sneered. ‘Christ, imagine that swinging brass dick.’

‘She’s cold,’ Dan said. ‘But I’d still hit it.’

‘He’s emotionless,’ Ben said.

‘She’s frigid,’ Jonah said.

‘I don’t like that tie with that shirt,’ Sue said.

‘I’ll change it,’ Kent said.

Sue crossed her legs. ‘You don’t have to,’ she said with a hint of diffidence.

Kent clasped his hands. ‘I’m happy to,’ he said. ‘If it pleases you.’

‘I don’t understand two words he says,’ Amy said.

‘I don’t understand that many,’ Ben said.

‘She scares me a little bit,’ Gary said.

‘Only a little bit?’ Dan asked.

Kent rolled over in bed. Sue was lay beside him; serene and still. To anyone else she would have looked as untouchable as a queen. As unobtainable as a goddess.

Sue turned to him. Kent was gazing at her; calm and collected. To anyone else he would have looked at untouchable as the sphinx. As unobtainable as a statue.  

But there was nobody else there. Nobody to mistake her reserve. Nobody to misunderstand his restraint.

Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said.

She took his hand. A symbol of her trust.

He kissed her. A symbol of his affection.

“I love you” was meaningless. People bandied it around as a kind of magic spell. As if it had some kind of deeper intrinsic meaning.

The meaning was in her touch. The meaning was in his eyes.

The words were unnecessary.

The End.


End file.
